Sr. Software Engineer - Backend/Full-stack

Canaan Partners; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Vision, dental coverage

Commuter plans

Parental leave

Job summary

Instrumental is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer in Palo Alto to own the platform layer—services, pipelines, and infrastructure that power our product. You will drive design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations across the full software lifecycle.

The ideal candidate has 5+ years in backend or platform engineering, startup experience, and fluency in Python or Go. You will collaborate across teams, adopt AI tooling, and help improve reliability, observability, and performance

Qualifications

• 5+ years backend or platform engineering experience; startup experience required
• Ownership of production systems - from design through deployment and operations
• Pragmatic, well-reasoned technical decisions and can articulate tradeoffs
• Fluent in Python or Go; experience with other backend languages is a plus
• Experience with data modeling and data processing pipelines
• Leads the way in AI tool adoption on their teams to improve development productivity and outcomes
• Communicates clearly and collaborates effectively across teams

Responsibilities

• Own the full software development lifecycle across design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations
• Build and evolve core platform services with an emphasis on pragmatism, maintainability, and operational excellence
• Improve system simplicity, reliability, security, observability, incident detection, and response
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity and iteration speed
• Identify, evaluate, and prioritize new tools, technologies, and technical debt based on ROI
• Collaborate across engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities meet product, AI, and edge system needs

Skills

Python

Go

Backend engineering

Platform engineering

Data modeling

Data pipelines

AI tooling

Team collaboration

Job description

Sr. Software Engineer (Platform)

Palo Alto, CA

Engineering

Hybrid

Full-time

Instrumental technology is used by the world's most admired electronics brands, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, and Meta, to accelerate new product development and improve production yields. Our technology leverages AI to process data generated on the manufacturing floor, automating failure identification and resolution, improving yield, quality, and time-to-market. In the past few quarters, our technology has become mission-critical for AI server manufacturers. We're rapidly growing our global presence to enable deeper integrations into our customers' complex manufacturing environments.

Instrumental is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer who will take broad ownership of our platform layer: the services, pipelines, and infrastructure that the rest of engineering depends on. The ideal candidate will be able to operate independently on ambiguous problems, make sound architectural decisions with limited guidance, and raise the bar for the team through both their technical contributions and their influence on engineering practices. We are explicitly looking for someone who has already demonstrated sustained impact in a professional setting, ideally at a startup where they owned systems end-to-end.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Own the full software development lifecycle across design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations
• Build and evolve core platform services with an emphasis on pragmatism, maintainability, and operational excellence
• Improve system simplicity, reliability, security, observability, incident detection, and response
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity and iteration speed
• Identify, evaluate, and prioritize new tools, technologies, and technical debt based on ROI
• Collaborate across engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities meet product, AI, and edge system needs

We're Looking for Someone Who:

• Has 5+ years of backend or platform engineering experience; startup experience required
• Takes full ownership of production systems - from design through deployment and operations
• Makes pragmatic, well-reasoned technical decisions and can articulate their tradeoffs
• Is fluent in Python or Go; experience with other backend languages is a plus
• Has experience with data modeling and data processing pipelines
• Leads the way in AI tool adoption on their teams to improve development productivity and outcomes
• Communicates clearly and collaborates effectively across teams

We're a growing team that works collaboratively, supports each other, and is energized by having an impact. We value passion and the ability to learn - you're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't match the job description precisely!

The following is a representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area: $185,000-$225,000. In addition, job level and salary opportunities are evaluated during our interview process - we review each applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Instrumental is proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits, including health, vision, dental, commuter plans, and parental leave.